“For all of the 14 years we’ve been covering the streets, we’ve never broadcast for a solid 24 hours.”
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| Street Roots cover featuringt the 24 hour project |
So they did. In a 24 hour live coverage of homelessness in their town, reporters at Street Roots in Portland, the US, tweeted what they saw, heard and felt while they were out on the streets on one winter day without any waterproof or coldproof so to be in the same condition as those experiencing homelessness.
Their report on the 24 hour project was published in Street Roots 21 December 2012 edition. Comments are still welcome at #SR24, where you can read the complete feed on Twitter.
What the eight reporters did was simple. Yet its impact was compelling: through a total of over 1,700 tweets, Street Roots invited followers to virtually go under the skin of homelessness.
Each account of street life in less than 140 characters provides you with an insight to variety of situations where 'any normalcy is stripped away' and often open your eyes to obivous needs of people in the streets, like in this tweet: “Sometimes, and right now, I wish we had a dryer @streetroots. So many people simply wet all the time. So many frail canvas shoes.”
Street Roots’s project can be recommended to other papers around the world. What issues does your street life have in common with or different from Portland? What does an ordinary day of your vendor look like? What is the news in the 24 hour project that you would not otherwise have found? Keep us updated with your street investigation!
